Business owners guided by both concern for others and insight into the overall factors that lead to success, know this.

If the Democrats really want to get moral psychology working for them, I suggest that they focus less on distributive fairness — which is about whether everyone got what they deserved — and more on procedural fairness—which is about whether honest, open and impartial procedures were used to decide who got what. If there’s a problem with the ultra-rich, it’s not that they have too much wealth, it’s that they bought laws that made it easy for them to gain and keep so much more wealth in recent decades.

The role of government is always a subject of debate, but ensuring that scoundrels who are only motivated by putting money into their own pockets, and businesses that treat workers as disposable rather than seeing them as part of the collaborative effort that leads to success, are not allowed to enrich themselves without any oversight.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a visiting professor at the N.Y.U.-Stern School of Business. He is the author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.”